Barbara White - The In-Between Hour

What could be worse than losing your child?

Having to pretend he’s still alive...

Bestselling author Will Shepard is caught in the twilight of grief, after his young son dies in a car accident. But when his father’s aging mind erases the memory, Will rewrites the truth. The story he spins brings unexpected relief…until he’s forced to return to rural North Carolina, trapping himself in a lie.

Holistic veterinarian Hannah Linden is a healer who opens her heart to strays but can only watch, powerless, as her grown son struggles with inner demons. When she rents her guest cottage to Will and his dad, she finds solace in trying to mend their broken world, even while her own shatters.

As their lives connect and collide, Will and Hannah become each other’s only hope—if they can find their way into a new story, one that begins with love.

Praise for Barbara Claypole White’s debut novel,

The Unfinished Garden

“I learned so much about myself from this story—that fear doesn’t have to hold me back, but rather, it can move me forward. The Unfinished Garden is a touching and accomplished debut.”

—Diane Chamberlain, bestselling author of The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes

“White…conveys the condition of OCD, and how it creates havoc in one’s life and the lives of loved ones, with style and grace, never underplaying the seriousness of the disorder.”

—RT Book Reviews

“A powerful story of friendship and courage in the midst of frightening circumstances….I highly recommend this wonderful love story.”

—Bergers’ Book Reviews

“A mesmerizing tale of fear, loss, and love. Tilly and James are richly drawn and wonderfully flawed characters who embody the contradictions and imperfections that exist in all of us. Barbara Claypole White has created a novel as beautiful and complex, dark and light, sweet and sensuous as Tilly’s beloved garden.”

—Joanne Rendell, author of The Professors’ Wives’ Club

“Barbara Claypole White has created such a likable, adorable, entertaining main character that I never wanted this book to end.”

—Lydia Netzer, author of Shine Shine Shine

“I found the writing style in The Unfinished Garden reminiscent of Rosamunde and Robin Pilcher. As a fan of both, I truly enjoyed this book and look forward to many more from Barbara Claypole White.”

—Julie Kibler, author of Calling Me Home

The

In-Between

Hour

Barbara Claypole White

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For my sister, Susan Rose

And for my friend Leslie Gildersleeve

Do you know me in the gloaming,

Gaunt and dusty gray with roaming?

—From “Flower-Gathering” by Robert Frost

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.

—Helen Keller

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Occoneechee Mountain became a North Carolina State Natural Area in 1999. Rising above the Eno River, the summit is the highest point between the town of Hillsborough, Orange County, and the Atlantic Ocean. Rare plants growing on the mountain and the presence of the brown elfin butterfly suggest the habitat has changed little since the last Ice Age.

The Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation is a small Native American community located primarily in Pleasant Grove, Alamance County. In 2002, it won state recognition as North Carolina’s eighth official Indian tribe.

The seventeenth-century Occaneechi village in Hills­borough was excavated between 1983 and 1995. The Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation held its first powwow there in 1995, and John Blackfeather blessed the ground in 1997. Reconstruction of the village began shortly afterward and was completed in 2004. The village has been moved to the ancestral lands in Pleasant Grove.

For information on the Occaneechi Homeland Preservation Project, please visit www.obsn.org.

For information on the Occaneechi Path, also called the Indian Trading Path, please visit tradingpath.org.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Acknowledgments

Excerpt

Reader’s Guide for the In-Between Hour

Questions for Discussion

Listening Guide

A Conversation with the Author

One

Will imagined silence. The silence of snowfall in the forest. The silence at the top of a crag. But eighty floors below his roof garden, another siren screeched along Central Park West.

Nausea nibbled—a hungry goldfish gumming him to death. Maybe this week’s diet of Zantac and PBR beer was to blame. Or maybe grief was a degenerative disease, destroying him from the inside out. Dissolving his organs. One. By. One.

The screensaver on his MacBook Air, a rainbow of tentacles that had once reminded him to watch for shooting stars, mutated into a kraken: an ancient monster dragging his life beneath the waves. How long since he’d missed his deadline? His agent had been supportive, his editor generous, but patience—even for clients who churned out global bestsellers—expired.

Another day when he’d failed to resuscitate his crap work-in-progress; another day when Agent Dodds continued to dangle from the helicopter; another day without a strategy for his hero of ten years that wasn’t a fatal “Let go, dude. Just let go.”

The old-fashioned ring tone of his iPhone burst into the night as expected. Almost on cue. His dad’s memory might be jouncing around too much for either of them to follow, but it continued to hold both their lives hostage.

Answer, aim for the end of the call, get there.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Fucking bastards. They’re—”

“Fucking bastards. You told me earlier.” Fifty-seven minutes earlier.

Finally, this vacuous loop of repetition had given them conversation, and always it started with the same two words: fucking bastards.

“Fucking bastards won’t let me sit out and talk to the crows. Took away my bird call. Said I were disturbin’ folks.”

“We talked about this last time you called, Dad.” Will kept his voice flat, even. Calm. Defusing anger was an old skill—the lone positive side effect of his batshit-insane childhood. And emotional distance? He had that honed before he’d turned eighteen. “I told you I’d look at the contract in the morning. And you promised to take a temazepam and go to bed.”

There had to be some way to persuade the old man to meet with a psychologist, some way to unpick the damage of Jack Nicholson’s performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

“Fucking bastards. Want to steal my Wild Turkey, too.”

His dad veered off on the usual rant: trash the staff of Hawk’s Ridge Retirement Community—check; pause to exclude the new art teacher with the cute smile—check; ask Will when he last noticed a woman’s smile—check; hurl expletives at ol’ possum face, the director—check. Strange, how the old man failed to drop his g’s with the f word.

A retired grave digger who’d dropped out of school at sixteen to work in the cotton mill—third shift—Jacob Shepard might refer to himself as dumber than a rock, but he’d read every history book in the Orange County Library before retirement. The old man was an underachiever by choice, devoting himself to the only thing that mattered: loving his Angeline.